Almost four years ago I encountered Terry Tempest Williams' writing in a memoir about her mother's death: When Women Were Birds, Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. When I put the book down, I wrote to her and thanked her. I also told her my story of leaving the LDS church. Her meditations on being a woman in that world, on birds, on wildlife, on family, was a turning point I will always be thankful for.
This fall I visited the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge, which she wrote about in her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. A marsh in a desert, around a great inland sea. A great expanse of sky along the granite folds and ridges of the Wasatch range. How do you ever forget such a landscape? I never have.
I have learned that part of healing from trauma is reconnecting with your body. Part of reconnecting for me has meant allowing my body to be in the place where everything once fell apart. Hearing the voices and seeing the deep blue eyes of my family members that lived through the trauma with me, and have put together the pieces in their own lives as much as they could. I am convinced that trying to forget about pain is a form of disconnection with oneself, like a pipe break that spills beneath the soil and prevents anything from growing. I am not saying that dwelling on the past is advisable, but that there is a healthy kind of remembering, the kind that walks on an old trail and is willing and able to look around in a way that invites all that has changed to coexist with the pain. A meditation of sorts.
I once moved to Utah, bright eyed and hopeful in a story of eternity that glowed like the temple in the night sky out my window. I dreamt of temple marriage, of being filled with god's pure love, and of waking up without shame. I believed in heaven and angels and in visions and personal revelation. And while I believed all these things I learned what poison tasted like, and my body learned how it took over, and I learned that my spiritual home was neither safe, nor were the men who watched all the doors. I learned my voice would never be mine in the world I inherited, and when I left I was gasping for air more than I was having any great revelations. I had to leave.
If you ever wonder if you are free in a relationship or within your religion, try to leave. See what they do, listen to what they say or do not say. I have read volumes in the space of their silence. My voice has grown in the hollows of the church's eyes. I have learned what love is in exile, when the only one left to love me was myself. I have learned to take their grimy teachings off my body, and to to find refuge in spaces they cannot see or control.
The mormon church is led by men with more power than they should have, who are corrupt and weak, and do not know the Jesus of whom they speak. They believe they are filled with prophecy and benevolence, and their words are hollowed out by hatred and fear. They cannot imagine a world where women are brave, powerful, and loud. They haven't seen the visions I have, all the women they have made invisible. I hear their wings, I see them soaring everywhere.
